Andy Budd - Founder, Design Leader, Investor

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There's an element of risk of being an entrepreneur, there's an element of going into the unknown and also there's the element like self-reliance.

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They're sort of on the outside or they don't really fit in.

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It's great, just embrace that, like you, don't have to fit the rules there's a whole generation of people who were given iPhones, given tablets, given technology to figure this out, and there's another older generation that were given the technology and they were told that the only way you could work it out is by being taught.

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I think an early stage founder with a freelancer could be a match made in heaven, show me the Figma, show me the GitHub.

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If you show me those two things and you can talk and walk me through it, I'm all set.

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Let's start working together.

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Hey Andy, how are you doing?

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How are you doing?

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I'm doing good, sorry, I'm a few minutes late.

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I was having a few weird problems with my camera, but I think it's all sorted now.

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I can see you, you can see me.

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Hopefully it will be recording.

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I can see something's uploading, so that's a good start.

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So yeah, I'm doing well thanks.

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Amazing.

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Well, thanks for taking the time and for coming on.

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I'm excited you're here here.

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Um, I think, uh, from a design perspective also, I've been, I've talked to a lot of founders recently and and, um, but, uh, but we haven't had I haven't had a lot of good design chats.

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So I'm excited to to dive into that as well brilliant.

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Well, yeah, I'm, I'm.

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You know this is stuff I love.

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You know I've been doing this stuff for 20, 30 years.

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I love bringing kind of founders and designers together and obviously in the pursuit of brilliant products and product market fit.

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And so if I can inspire a few of your listeners to go and lean into the design world a little bit more than, yeah, my job's done.

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Oh, my gosh and design is close to my heart.

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I was at Fjord for a while.

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I've been in the agency world for a while, but also but Fjord was one of those pivotal moments where it was sort of like, you know, it's less about pretty comps and more sort of like why do you need this?

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Does the user need this, you know, and just like really getting steeped in CX, and I just love that.

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That.

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It's almost like taking, trying to take a client from what are your priorities and what are your budgets and what are your goals, and going all the way out and then starting from the outside and being like what does john or sue need?

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And then let's work backwards, which I love I'm very familiar with the field story.

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I knew them when they were like a 20 30 person team before the sale and the scale and all that kind of stuff.

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So, um, I have a, I have a good feeling that we're probably on a, on a similar wavelength there.

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So so I I mean your hands.

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So yeah, let's do it, I think.

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I think I'd love to almost start like um, yeah really quickly.

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One last thing.

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Um, one thing I've realized is for some reason I've got camo camera on, which I don't normally use, but it's throwing a little kind of icon in the bottom of the screen, which is not great.

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Do you want me to try and like?

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I don't, I don't see it.

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Let me let me see if I can.

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Uh, let me see if I can tell if you oh, I see that, I see that um, I mean your call, I mean either way, um, it's, it's fine let me just see if I can switch to a different camera and see if that fucks things up, so it'll be the same camera.

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It's just not going through software.

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So before we start, yeah let me just switch over, see if this does the trick.

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It's not liking switching cameras, so we just have to deal with the watermark all good, all good, um, amazing.

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Well, I think, you know, I'm what I'm really interested in is going back prior to, from zero to um perspective.

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Uh, you know, when I started my company, I had this idea that, you know, I like the idea of, of zero to one, and I love, I love the book and the philosophy.

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What's interesting is when you, I feel like when you start on this journey, one is, you know, at a small scale or a large scale, what is?

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What does it feel like when you sort of hit these levels?

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And are you there yet?

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Have you achieved it, you know, or does it sort of keep the ball moving?

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Have you achieved it, you know, or does it sort of keep the ball moving?

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And so I think, as we sort of before we dive into sort of your entrepreneurial history and as a founder and as a design leader, and then into the world of investing in VC and coaching prior to that, like whether it be at university or did you sort of you know what was your upbringing and family and environment or personality that you think sort of might have led you towards becoming a founder or the entrepreneurial journey?

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Happy to give that a go.

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So, yeah, happy to dive in.

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So yeah, I assume, with the way chatting now, this isn't the podcast, so I'll let you kind of no, no, no, this is it, this is it.

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Yeah, I love just diving into the like, just having a conversation back and forth, and I less like the sort of.

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The second question that I have for you is you know?

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So yeah, let's just chat.

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And I.

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So I don't know how relevant this is, but when I was sort of young I was sort of diagnosed with dyslexia, you know, and it turns out in later life a lot of kids that had dyslexia are sort of drawn into entrepreneurship.

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So what dyslexia tends to be is people that have dyslexia tend to be pretty smart.

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They tend to be really good at science, they tend to be really good at maths.

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They tend to struggle a little bit with the written word and language, and so what often happens is they are kind of they're poorly served at school A lot of the time teachers don't have time for them.

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Often teachers think they're stupid when they're not.

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I think a lot of kids like this sometimes have a little bit of attention problems because their brain is, like you know, six months or a year ahead of class, and so you know a lot of time I'll be sitting there just kind of bored because I've done the work I've done.

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You know I knew what was going on and you know maybe a little bit of a difficult kid to handle, and so a lot of kids like this kind of get left behind and so they find that academia isn't really their route, but entrepreneurship is.

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One of the classic examples is richard branson.

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Like you know, a lot of people have different views of richard branson, but he was somebody who was incredibly smart, incredibly driven.

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Academia failed him but that threw him into a kind of an independent um desire to be an entrepreneur.

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And so I think that's probably partly where, where it comes from a sense of I don't necessarily trust in the school to look after me, so I need to kind of make my own way, I need to kind of figure something out myself.

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Now, luckily, I was pretty academic.

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I went and did engineering at university.

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Um, I was, you know.

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My interest in computer stemmed from being a kid, you know I.

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You know, in the uk we had this sort of um program called the bbc micro, which were one of the first computers around.

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They put it into schools all around the country to encourage people to program because for some reason back in the sort of the 80s people realized that computers would be the future and program would be a good thing.

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So while all of my friends were running around outside playing football, I was inside with a couple of my other nerdy friends making a little kind of drawing turtle move around on a bit of paper.

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You know I was also playing dungeons and dragons.

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You know, basically I was a sort of the archetypical, um kind of stranger things kind of you know kind of group of of kids.

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Um I got a spectrum.

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A spectrum was one of the first, um kind of home computers in the us.

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You had commodores and various other things um and amigas.

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I had a little kind of spectrum rubber keyboard and I would, you know, type out games that were in magazines.

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This is showing how old I am.

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I'd buy a spectrum magazine.

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There'd be a little game.

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I'd type it out.

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I'd get, you know, semicolon in the wrong place and it would all break.

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And but that was how I got into into into computers.

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I didn't know what I wanted to do for a career, so I went off traveling.

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I discovered the internet while I was away I met.

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I met this guy in a hostel in Singapore and he seemed like he had a bunch of money and I was like, how do you travel?

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And he was like, well, I do this thing called HTML.

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It's really easy, any of you could do it.

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I work in London for six months and I travel for six months.

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I want some of that.

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And so I came back to the UK.

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I bought a little 486 computer.

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I would sit in my local kind of borders coffee shop and read all the books for free and basically somehow managed to kind of start doing design work and I did one project, two project, five projects.

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I had a little bit of time in an agency and then I decided to kind of set out on my own.

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So I founded what was arguably the first UX agency in the UK called ClearLeft.

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I ran that for 15 years.

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We were really well known.

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We ran conferences all over the world.

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I spoke at conferences all over the world.

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I got to meet Marty, who was one of your previous guests at South by Southwest.

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Through this I've met several of your other guests through my travel and my speaking and I just love it.

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I love building, love building something for nothing.

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I love there's an element of risk of being an entrepreneur.

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There's an element of going into the unknown and also there's the element, like I sort of said before, of like self-reliance, like you're not putting all your eggs in somebody else's market basket.

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You either succeed or fail, and you succeed or fail kind of on your your own terms and and so I like that about it.

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Um, like weirdly, a lot of my hobbies are in that space as well.

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Like I two of my hobbies I'm a cave diver and I'm a pilot, both of those.

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Both of those hobbies are kind of like they're risky hobbies but they're not risky if you are in control, like if you're, if you're managing the risks, you know if something goes wrong in a cockpit, you're the one that's got to sort it out.

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If something goes wrong in a cave underground, you're the one that's got to sort it out.

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If something goes wrong in a cave underground, you've got to sort it out.

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And so you have to have real confidence in your own problem solving ability.

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You're not just throwing up your hands and saying I can't deal with this, it's somebody else's problem.

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And so there's just something about my character, my nature, that really really draws me to sort of that entrepreneurship journey For the purpose of your audiences.

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I don't do that anymore.

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But what I do now like I've run a few startups and I've run my agency, but now I work in the VC space helping other entrepreneurs, and I love that now being able to kind of pay it forward and help all these amazing, young, enthusiastic kind of founders, benefit from my experience and help them, you know, on their journey.

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And through doing that you know, if I'm just an entrepreneur, I can start one, two, three businesses, but now I can have a thumb prints on 10, 20, 30, 40 businesses, and so I love it.

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That's amazing.

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There's a couple of things that I'd love to unpack.

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One I can I can very much relate with the uh as a neurodivergent ADHD, like I had the exact same path.

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I'm sitting in Spanish class as a freshman and I'm just like I don't want to repeat these words back to you I wish I was home messing with my computer and like taking it apart and like learning how it works and breaking it and getting a new one.

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And you know and I think there's something to that like it's also nice to be able to share with others that if they feel like they're sort of on the outside or they don't really fit into sort of like the normal paths of things, it's great, just embrace that, like you don't have to sort of like fit the rules, um, and and I think that also does stem I'm very similar in that way too that it does stem, I think, from this, like the um, there's a a need to continue learning and trying new things, and I think that you know that for me was I never really worked at a corporate job more than about two years because I'd be like OK, I did that, I got it, I understand it.

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What are we doing next?

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You know, and so I just had to keep going.

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I mean, this is one of the things I know about myself is like I.

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I have some of my friends that get into a thing and they go deep and deep and deep and they're fascinated by it.

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For me, I love playing at the surface, like I I I love learning a new thing.

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Once I've stopped learning the new thing, I want to move on to the next thing.

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Like at the moment I'm learning drums.

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I don't know why I've never had a musical bone in my body but just thought, wouldn't it be cool to learn the drums?

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I don't imagine I'll ever be an amazing drummer.

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I imagine in a year or two's time I'll stop and find something else.

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But it's that, you know, and this is also stems from my love of travel.

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I love going to new places, I love exploring new things.

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It's this kind of curiosity and I think as a founder, you have to have curiosity and you have to have comfort in going to places that are uncomfortable.

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And actually I think to some extent the skills of being a really good early-stage founder aren't necessarily the skills of being a great later-stage founder, because actually a lot of those founders get really bored quickly.

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They crave novelty and the first three, four, five years of your startup journey I know my journey was novelty.

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The next five years is kind of processes and it's kind of optimizing and it's kind of often doing the same thing over and over again, and so I meet a lot of founders that really struggle with the second half of their career because it's now it's being grown up.

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It's like having a proper job and you're dealing with.

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you know and they want to get coming here to like a career.

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Ceo is is very different than like what are we doing tomorrow?

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I don't know.

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Let's figure it out this is one of the things I've.

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You know, I've got a lot of people in my network who are great at starting things and I've got a lot of people on my network are great at taking things that I've already started and optimizing.

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And I think the perfect scalable kind of unicorn kind of entrepreneur has to weirdly somewhere sit in the middle and that's a real unique thing.

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You have to love the scaling things and getting things off the ground, but you also have to love then building a community around this, this idea of, like pioneers, settlers and town planners.

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Most people are either a pioneer, a settler or a town planner.

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The great thing about the successful unicorn entrepreneur is they go through all of those phases and they're comfortable in each of those phases or they get comfortable quick enough, Right.

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So, yeah, there's this idea that I've always been fascinated with.

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It goes back to when I was a kid.

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People would ask me what do you want to be when you grow up?

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And I would.

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I would be like, oh, I want to be a, I want to be a detective and a sniper, and uh, you know, like I would have a good list off like all of these different things and and, and I feel like I've I've done that, um, throughout my life which is learning, you know, photography, and leading design teams, but also leading development teams, and going to get like an html boot camp or going to like learn javascript or api, and as one of those that from the outside, in the traditional parent sort of manner, it feels very untethered and you don't know what you're doing.

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And but what's interesting is that as soon as I started sacklist, I now know all of these things and I'll do the video editing and I'll do the wireframes and I'll lead the website and then I'll also set up intercom and like, and just being able to do all these things almost sort of sets you up, you know, to be able to sort of run all of the different parts of the ship before you start handing them over to someone else.

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And I think, interestingly, I think the future of work is going to require more people with that entrepreneurial mindset, because I think, from our parents and grandparents perspective, you know, like my, I guess my, my grandparents would have worked in an environment where they would have had a company for life.

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You know, you go and you start in one company at the age of 18 and you're there all the way through.

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My parents generation would have had a career for for their whole life.

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Like you start on the bottom run and you work your way up, I guess I'm starting to be in a generation where you will have three or four careers throughout your entire life, like I was.

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I mean, weirdly, I was a dive instructor and then I was a designer and then I was a company owner and now I'm a VC and a coach.

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You know, and that's partly because, like, industries are getting disrupted at the speed of thought.

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Like you know, industries are getting disrupted every generation, every 10 or 20 years, and so for my generation, in order to stay doing something interesting, relevant, I have had to reinvent myself every 20 years or so.

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I think the next generation are probably going to be even more compacted.

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They're going to be having to reinvent themselves every five or six years.

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You know they're going to have to kind of get used really quickly to AI and have to adopt those tools.

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They.

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You know, if you're a designer now, I have no idea whether the industry of design will be in any way, shape or form where it will be, you know, in 10 years time.

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You know, I suspect that you know Gen AI will massively blow a big hole in a lot of industries, and so you have to have that person.

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You have to be that personality that finds a thing fascinating, will spend a bunch of time learning it but will also hold it loosely.

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I think this is not like me a lot of people who have a mindset that they're good at one thing and it's almost like a scary, risky nature to it.

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I can never let it go.

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And if you're that person, I could never let it go.

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You are right for disruption.

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Whereas a lot of the the younger, millennial, gen Z people I know like I give you an example, like you said it there, like I know a lot of people who if I say to them like I really need you to go and do a video, the natural response is I've never done that before, I don't know how to do it, I will have to go and hire an agency to do it and it will cost a ton of money.

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And then I go to a bunch of younger people and they'll go well, sure, I've never done it before, but how difficult can it be?

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I'll watch some YouTube videos, I'll experiment, I'll play and you know what?

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They might not be as good as the amazing agency, but they'll do it in a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost and it will be launched and live.

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And it's that fear that you need to get over, that fear of not knowing.

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But I think it's a web thing.

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I think, as a generation, there's a whole generation of people who were given iPhones, given tablets, given technology, just to figure this out.

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And there's another older generation that were given this technology and they were given a manual and a booklet and they were told that the only way you could work it out is by being taught.

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And get a certification.

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You need to prove that you have hit a certain level, and then we will allow you to go do this thing.

00:16:47.734 --> 00:16:48.214
Absolutely.

00:16:48.214 --> 00:16:52.339
I mean, there's nothing as low a value than a Microsoft certified engineer.

00:16:52.399 --> 00:17:00.254
in my book I'm sorry for anybody who's a Microsoft certified engineer listening to this, I totally get it.

00:17:00.254 --> 00:17:30.911
But I also, you know, when I started the interactive division at an agency in 2000, and the first project manager that I interviewed had just gotten out of school and she talked a lot about how she had two masters and had really focused on business and project management and things like that, and on the other side I had not graduated, I quit sort of junior year and I had sort of like already been dealing with the clients of, of you know, Home Depot and and NASCAR and all these sort of things, and in my mind it just sort of clicked.

00:17:30.951 --> 00:17:48.180
It's like but you haven't dealt, you haven't dealt with a client that is ornery or like, goes back on what they said from yesterday or whatever it is, and I think it's that sort of experience of just really digging in and like getting it under your skin, uh, versus someone saying you know you have, you have accomplished the test and this is actually why I really like the early web.

00:17:48.220 --> 00:17:55.386
You know, I like the first 10 years of my career because most of the people I met they didn't have um degrees in the subject.

00:17:55.386 --> 00:18:03.458
Because there were no degrees in the subject, like you know, back in the the early noughties, you didn't go and do a web design or an interaction design or a entrepreneurship course.

00:18:03.458 --> 00:18:18.074
Like you would figure this out yourself and I think now and so, like I've hired people that have had degrees, but I've never hired people in the tech space because of their degree, you know I'll hire people who can show gumption, they can show grit, they can.

00:18:18.375 --> 00:18:20.142
They can show that they can do the work.

00:18:20.142 --> 00:18:21.465
They can show examples of design.

00:18:21.465 --> 00:18:23.490
They can example examples of code.

00:18:23.490 --> 00:18:27.717
I want to you know, when I'm doing an interview, like I almost don't really look at their, their cv.

00:18:28.018 --> 00:18:38.548
I don't care whether you've been to princeton or whether you've done this course or that course right, like, show me the money, show me show me what you show me the figma, show me the github, like, if you show me those two things and you can talk and walk me through it, I'm all set.

00:18:38.548 --> 00:18:39.651
Let's, let's start working together.

00:18:39.671 --> 00:18:46.542
Yeah and I think in a way, actually I I'm going to counter some of the things I said before, because I do think that kind of sort of pioneering spirit has gone by the wayside a little bit.

00:18:46.542 --> 00:18:54.528
I do think hiring managers in big tech companies now they don't know what good looks like, so they hire based on do you have these, these brands?

00:18:54.528 --> 00:18:55.532
You have these logos?

00:18:55.532 --> 00:18:59.988
Were you a junior middle level designer in figma for three years and you jumped to airbnb?

00:19:00.509 --> 00:19:18.834
And I'm actually one of the challenge they have with, with a lot, lot of the founders that I work with, is that a lot of founders that I work with are makers themselves, they are business people or they just kind of like have an idea They've never hired a designer or they never hired an engineer, and so they often have to go for the same signals.

00:19:18.834 --> 00:19:26.351
It's like, oh, I'm really excited because I've landed this great hire from Meta, and that always kind of makes me feel a little bit, you know, kind of oh, I wonder what's going to happen.

00:19:26.351 --> 00:19:40.082
Not because designers and developers at Meta aren't amazing there are many that are but a lot of them are used to working in a really structured environment or slower paced or like things you can sort of take and you rely on the whole team and you're sort of one little part of it.

00:19:43.365 --> 00:19:44.429
They are often not building zero to one.

00:19:44.429 --> 00:19:48.667
They are often iterating on an existing system that's been there for 10 or 20 years From a designer's perspective.

00:19:48.667 --> 00:19:50.674
They're not building design from scratch.

00:19:50.674 --> 00:19:53.555
They're using a really well-established design system.

00:19:53.555 --> 00:20:00.376
They have a massive kind of brain trust of really experienced people they can call upon if things get stuck.

00:20:00.376 --> 00:20:01.578
And yeah, absolutely.

00:20:01.925 --> 00:20:06.368
I met a designer from a really big tech company who remained nameless.

00:20:06.368 --> 00:20:12.393
He was really frustrated, like andy, like I've been in this company for nine months and I've designed one set of logos, like.

00:20:12.393 --> 00:20:14.336
And I was like oh, wow, that's not much.

00:20:14.336 --> 00:20:15.548
And he's like I want to say one set.

00:20:15.548 --> 00:20:19.277
I mean like literally like four icons with a few variations.

00:20:19.277 --> 00:20:21.671
And he's basically saying like I spend a week designing them.

00:20:21.671 --> 00:20:24.638
I spend three months and going around to all the meetings pitching them.

00:20:24.638 --> 00:20:24.874
I get feedback.

00:20:24.874 --> 00:20:25.576
I then come back and spend a week designing them.

00:20:25.576 --> 00:20:26.313
I spend three months in going around to all the meetings pitching them.

00:20:26.313 --> 00:20:26.426
I get feedback.

00:20:26.426 --> 00:20:29.295
I then come back and spend another week designing them and do another three months.

00:20:29.315 --> 00:20:33.255
And he was like what am I going to say to any future employees, like employers?

00:20:33.255 --> 00:20:34.609
Like, what have you been doing for nine months?

00:20:34.609 --> 00:20:38.233
Well, I did this cool thumbs up icon and that's it.

00:20:38.233 --> 00:20:48.251
And you're, like you know, even if it used by billions and billions of people like you, really, really struggle to get volume and velocity.

00:20:48.251 --> 00:21:08.230
And so I really try and encourage, if you're hiring a first-time engineer, sorry, if you're hiring a founding engineer or founding designer or founding product manager, I much prefer people that have come from small startup background or have come from agency background, even because you're running really fast on limited resources, there there's no safety net, there's no one there telling you what to do and you're used to doing zero to one.

00:21:08.230 --> 00:21:15.156
I mean a lot of people that hire these amazing designers and developers and product people and they just they get stuck because there's no one directing them.

00:21:15.978 --> 00:21:25.468
Well, and I would also throw into that group, I would say, career freelancers, because I think this is actually where we're headed to, like you know, ben Huffman and what he's done with Contra, you know.

00:21:25.468 --> 00:21:31.011
I mean, fiverr and Upwork have been the sort of standard forever, and now Contra is, just like you know, gobbling up everything.

00:21:31.011 --> 00:21:34.555
And I love it because I love the interface, I love their design team, I love what they do.

00:21:34.555 --> 00:21:40.500
But what's really interesting is when you find a freelance designer that is, that does that full time.

00:21:40.500 --> 00:21:41.440
That is bread and butter.

00:21:41.440 --> 00:21:47.528
And I'm going to, I'm going to come in, I'm going to get your requirements really quick, I'm going to show you something really quick, we're going to get feedback, we're going to iterate on it.

00:21:47.528 --> 00:21:53.520
We're not sort of sitting around going let's have a two week onboarding and let's talk about sort of like you know requirements.

00:21:53.642 --> 00:22:21.250
Actually, the first designer, that Valerie's a SaaS platform plus mobile, and all we did was sort of like, discuss a couple of UI elements here and there and all of a sudden I had 60 boards of everything and then it was like, okay, what do you want to work on next?

00:22:21.250 --> 00:22:33.205
And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is just so like, it's so great to go, you know, instead of the old waterfall where we sort of like, do a requirements document and then we do full wireframes that, like the company never looks at, like you know, and just all that.

00:22:33.205 --> 00:22:33.346
That.

00:22:33.346 --> 00:22:36.788
You just get right into the heart of something that can be, you know, developed.

00:22:37.089 --> 00:22:38.451
So this is, this is the thing I see.

00:22:38.451 --> 00:22:41.753
So I, I'm the entrepreneurs, the founders I work with.

00:22:41.753 --> 00:22:43.056
They have a vision in their head.

00:22:43.056 --> 00:22:49.566
The problem is, because it's a vision, it's kind of fuzzy and imprecise and they try and work with an engineer to get it out of their head.

00:22:49.566 --> 00:22:53.501
But engineers are maybe not as good at kind of articulating.

00:22:53.501 --> 00:23:06.317
You know they're looking, you know they're looking for directions, they're looking for certainty, the code needs specificity and so, even though there are amazing developers out there, like, it's often could be quite a challenging situation for founders to talk to engineers and vice versa.

00:23:06.317 --> 00:23:10.751
Often they bring a product manager, but again, that's not quite often, doesn't quite right like particularly early stage.

00:23:11.354 --> 00:23:22.854
I think an early stage founder with a freelancer could be a match made in heaven, because that freelancer is able to take what they're thinking, articulate it visually, point it back to them and say is this what you mean?

00:23:23.434 --> 00:23:24.076
Is this the flow?

00:23:24.076 --> 00:23:32.924
You mean like when you say you want something to be easy, easy like this or easy like that, when you say that you want it to be seamless, you know whatever it is like, you know um and so and you can do that really quickly.

00:23:32.924 --> 00:23:53.840
You know what might take you weeks, and weeks in code can take minutes or hours in figma, and so what I tend to find is, if you're able to find a great freelancer that worked with you for the first six or so weeks as you sort of hinted at the amount of volume that designer can produce in your backlog can then give you six months worth of backlog for your engineers to deal with.

00:23:53.840 --> 00:24:08.943
So you don't need to hire that full-time designer, because actually what I tend to find is, after that initial six or eight weeks or whatever that designer ends up kind of trying to find work for them to do, and the last thing you want is like a board designer trying to like throw needless things at an engineering team.

00:24:08.943 --> 00:24:10.626
That's really busy so I love.

00:24:10.747 --> 00:24:19.898
I love, like you know, six, eight weeks, a really good mid-level designer that is okay at ux, okay at visual design, but also, you know, good at ux design.

00:24:19.898 --> 00:24:23.996
Like you don't want somebody that's just an interior designer that makes things look pretty but have no, no substance.

00:24:24.859 --> 00:24:31.872
Yeah, and you don't want somebody A passion for product that uses things and like and references, like you know the thing on Airbnb when it drops down, like that.

00:24:31.872 --> 00:24:53.265
Or you know, if we go to like Upwork, we go like this sort of, and you start getting into that piece and you're right, because you could basically also, I'm just making this up but like, this is not what we did, but like six grand or eight grand, whatever it is, I now have 60 screens that can be developed and when I find a good engineer to do it, I don't have to do requirements.

00:24:53.265 --> 00:24:54.848
I go can we start on this page?

00:24:54.848 --> 00:24:55.971
And they go, okay, sounds great.

00:24:55.971 --> 00:24:57.415
And then you're good to go.

00:24:59.836 --> 00:25:02.117
If you've got a good designer, you don't really a product manager.

00:25:02.117 --> 00:25:09.862
Because because what tends to happen is, if you've got a product manager, it's almost like the, the telephone game, the the founder tries to articulate you know.

00:25:09.862 --> 00:25:13.163
Or the game where you try and touch a thing and you know, is it an elephant?

00:25:13.163 --> 00:25:13.486
You know what?

00:25:13.486 --> 00:25:14.868
What is it like, you know, with a blindfold.

00:25:14.868 --> 00:25:23.048
Like the, the founder tries to articulate it, the product manager then tries to articulate it more in language and then the designer just basically ships what they're told to ship.

00:25:23.048 --> 00:25:25.057
If you take that translation layer out, the designer just basically ships what they're told to ship.

00:25:25.057 --> 00:25:29.271
If you take that translation layer out, the designer is visually translating and, like I say, showing a thing and saying is this what you mean?

00:25:29.271 --> 00:25:31.605
Yes, no, yeah, absolutely you can.

00:25:31.605 --> 00:25:33.051
You can move really, really fast.

00:25:33.051 --> 00:25:36.836
So, yeah, I, you know, I always try and encourage that of the founders I support Definitely.

00:25:45.345 --> 00:25:48.887
I also think with a designer, you know a good designer when, when you find one having too many requirements, we sort of we funnel straight into like I'm just going to sort of do what you said here on the page.

00:25:48.887 --> 00:25:56.153
If you start from the high level vision of just like, show me a couple of sites you like and show me interactions you like and things like that, you sort of it's and it's it's.

00:25:56.153 --> 00:25:59.386
I, with designers I've worked with I know that have said that this is just the most fun moment.

00:25:59.386 --> 00:26:07.583
But, like by starting with file new and there's a blank slate is the most fun part of being able to be like I could make this any like I could make it new and different.

00:26:07.583 --> 00:26:09.990
I could make this something that people haven't seen, you know.

00:26:10.071 --> 00:26:33.257
But instead of like drilling into, like it's got to look like this, it's got to be like this and so that that sort of like letting someone go free first while you're still in ideation mode is is kind of a beautiful moment and I think it's useful for your, your non-design sort of literate founders, to kind of talk about the kind of just to really quickly define the kind of design I mean, because I meet a lot of founders whose impression of design is making it look pretty.

00:26:33.257 --> 00:26:44.154
You know, it's like I will figure out how the thing works, the engineer will figure out how the thing works, and then you put a gloss in it and you make the corners on the button look nice and you pick a font, et cetera.

00:26:44.154 --> 00:26:45.377
That's most people's view of design.

00:26:45.377 --> 00:26:47.730
It's interior design, it's making a space look pretty.

00:26:47.730 --> 00:26:58.356
But I would argue that these days, with AI, excluding AI, there's very little technical advancement that happens in a product.

00:26:59.886 --> 00:27:05.409
The difference between the product you're building now and the product you're trying to detopple or destable is usually the user experience.

00:27:05.409 --> 00:27:10.748
It's usually that it's not the unique features you've built, but it's how those features interact.

00:27:10.748 --> 00:27:12.211
It's how you get from place a to b.

00:27:12.211 --> 00:27:16.888
It's like how you, how the jobs to be done that you've identified get done.

00:27:16.888 --> 00:27:29.320
And I think a lot of the time founders and engineers think in a very logical, methodical way and when you look at the, the interfaces that come out of that, they make sense, but they're not nice to use, they're not quick to use.

00:27:29.761 --> 00:27:32.407
Often things are stored in different places.

00:27:32.407 --> 00:27:36.970
You have to jump to three or four different screens and this is a kind of experience that people are jumping away from.

00:27:36.970 --> 00:27:55.488
People are looking at products or design 10 years ago and saying I really hate it because my product does x not because it doesn't have this feature, because you can do features really quickly but it's like I really hate the way that when I press this button it goes to the wrong place or it doesn't remember xyz, and so the the designers I'm talking about, are much more like architects.

00:27:55.488 --> 00:28:04.911
They are thinking who's going to live in this house, what's their lifestyle, what are their preferences, and I'm going to create a building that's going to be perfect for them.

00:28:05.491 --> 00:28:07.413
And what happens when I move room to room.

00:28:07.413 --> 00:28:09.195
How does that feel and does it?

00:28:09.256 --> 00:28:09.635
flow.

00:28:09.635 --> 00:28:11.117
Are you a cook?

00:28:11.117 --> 00:28:14.922
I'm going to build you the best kitchen possible, where all of your tools are where you need them.

00:28:14.922 --> 00:28:19.477
You don't have to run across the kitchen to get rid of garbage.

00:28:19.477 --> 00:28:21.867
You are optimizing an experience.

00:28:21.867 --> 00:28:26.656
It just feels delightful and that is one of the big things that will make people switch.

00:28:26.656 --> 00:28:27.679
It's removing friction.

00:28:27.679 --> 00:28:29.369
It's creating a delightful product.

00:28:29.369 --> 00:28:58.528
The other thing and it's something I talk about in the book a lot I wrote a book called the Growth Equation, which I'm sure we'll come on to in a second, but a lot of it is around kind of figuring out how you can remove the barriers to value as quickly as possible and how you can get the time down to its smallest amount and I see a lot of kind of first iteration products where all the value is there but it's kind of hidden and it's clunky and it takes time and a lot of the people just like I just don't have the time for this.

00:28:58.949 --> 00:29:14.165
And a really great designer will smooth all the edges, they remove the friction, they remove the unnecessary elements, they will group things together in a way that people come in they go, oh I get this, oh I get what I can do with this, oh, I see that as well, I've actually done the thing, oh, I've got value.

00:29:14.165 --> 00:29:30.865
And if you can get value in five minutes or ten minutes, like a lot of the problems I have with a lot of the, so a lot of the the problems my founders have is they have built products which literally take weeks or months to get the first hint of value right and I've helped them get that down literally to minutes.

00:29:30.865 --> 00:29:35.565
And suddenly they're like all of their kind of, like their, their charts start hockey sticking.

00:29:35.565 --> 00:29:40.866
It's all really obvious stuff, but it's all stuff that if you give it a design, a design of in, well, that's a stupid way of doing it.

00:29:40.928 --> 00:29:44.536
You know you have to sign up for a wait list and you have to wait for six months or like a month.

00:29:44.536 --> 00:30:01.127
Then you have to do a demo and you have to hop on a call and then you have to fill in a bunch of forms and you have to wait until it gets integrated and then two months later, you, you're, you're getting value and it's like no, let's self-serve, let's, you know, not put a like a, like a door slam in our customers faces.

00:30:01.127 --> 00:30:02.771
Why do they need to sign up?

00:30:02.771 --> 00:30:03.192
What you know?

00:30:03.192 --> 00:30:04.856
Can't they just start adding value?

00:30:04.856 --> 00:30:09.886
Oh shit, like you know, you don't need a demo if, like, your product is there when people are using it immediately.

00:30:09.886 --> 00:30:27.817
So lots of this stuff kind of comes out in in the book around the things I've learned over the last four years as a vc, in the last 30 years as a product person I think, as a founder, it's also hard when you're, when you're diving in and building a product that, like you, the things that go through your brain, the legal and the terms and conditions.

00:30:27.857 --> 00:30:28.659
Have we done mixed panel?

00:30:28.659 --> 00:30:32.233
Somebody asked me what the what, the what, the churn was.

00:30:32.233 --> 00:30:32.997
How are we doing that?

00:30:32.997 --> 00:30:35.748
Is Google Analytics enough or do I need to like?

00:30:35.748 --> 00:30:38.590
And you're, and you're starting to sort of think about all the different.

00:30:38.611 --> 00:30:39.751
Someone has to delete their account.

00:30:39.751 --> 00:30:40.352
You can't have a.

00:30:40.352 --> 00:30:44.836
You know, you can't have an iPhone app unless you have a way to delete your account from the app.

00:30:44.836 --> 00:30:48.760
You know how do I charge people on Stripe on the web, but I also do it.

00:30:48.760 --> 00:30:53.113
And so there's all these pieces which sometimes gets really hard to also focus on.

00:30:53.113 --> 00:30:53.273
That.

00:30:53.273 --> 00:31:17.558
First, like 60 seconds of like I come in and I'm just going to do a couple of really basic tasks and I think for us you know there was a period where you came in and you you kind of try and build at least the model of the whole house, but then it's about like, just pivoting and going back to like those those handful of few moments and trying to figure out how to sort of reduce that friction I mean, and again, there's a few really interesting things there.

00:31:17.598 --> 00:31:24.298
So I think again, I think a lot of founders and a lot of engineering based founders think of the mechanics of this and you're right, there's lots of things that need to be done.

00:31:24.298 --> 00:31:25.520
There's lots of things that need to be built.

00:31:25.520 --> 00:31:31.094
You know, we're chasing this idea of feature parity, like all these more sophisticated products in the market.

00:31:31.094 --> 00:31:36.394
We have to get up to the level that they're at before anyone even can consider us, and then we need to do more.

00:31:36.394 --> 00:31:38.827
So we're constantly sort of adding features.

00:31:38.827 --> 00:31:44.017
We're in this sort of like feature delivery mindset, um, and that is important.

00:31:44.017 --> 00:31:54.568
I I'm not saying we can't do that, but I guess the way I kind of think about it, and often the advice I give to founders is as quickly as possible, they need to have swim lanes and it can start with allocating.

00:31:54.568 --> 00:31:57.950
So basically, I have this idea.

00:31:57.950 --> 00:32:01.011
Effectively, there are two things your product team need to do.

00:32:01.011 --> 00:32:04.946
They need to deliver new capability, which is all the new features.

00:32:04.946 --> 00:32:07.173
I couldn't do this on the platform before and now I can.

00:32:07.173 --> 00:32:12.692
New capability is massively important and new capability is a thing that most founders are thinking of.

00:32:12.692 --> 00:32:20.832
They're having conversations with found, with other users, and users are always going to say I need it to do x, and so that's a capability that you then turn into a feature.

00:32:20.832 --> 00:32:24.929
So capabilities are important, and the bulk of your engineering team will be building capabilities.

00:32:24.929 --> 00:32:26.815
The bulk of your product team will be doing that.

00:32:26.815 --> 00:32:31.347
But then you have accessing the value that currently exists.

00:32:31.909 --> 00:32:44.385
We are so focused on delivering new value we don't realize how difficult the existing value is to actually get, and so I think you need a separate team, and that separate team like could just be a designer and an engineer, or it doesn't even need to be a team.

00:32:44.385 --> 00:32:51.391
It could be like we're going to do two sprints of value creation or one sprint of value extraction and you just need to flip between the two.

00:32:51.391 --> 00:32:54.568
You need to go okay, well, we've built all this value, but can people actually get at it?

00:32:54.568 --> 00:32:56.217
What are the barriers in the way?

00:32:56.217 --> 00:33:00.368
What's slowing them down, what's confusing, what's weird, what's you know what's not working?

00:33:00.368 --> 00:33:07.342
Let's make sure that the value we've got is accessible, because, basically, if people can't get the existing value, adding more value isn't going to help.

00:33:07.342 --> 00:33:15.351
You're just kind of making more problems, and so you've got to kind of have this balance and there's a bit of a dance and so like, and also people have different mindsets.

00:33:15.371 --> 00:33:31.634
You know a designer or an engineer that's trying to think about, like, where the product will be in nine months time and what are the features set for this more complicated icp we're trading to is a very different mindset from someone that thinks in iteration, that thinks in um, like a test based kind of thinking.

00:33:31.634 --> 00:33:41.176
It's like okay, we've got this product here, we're expecting, you know, a, a activation rate of 30, but only 10 of our customers activating.

00:33:41.176 --> 00:33:42.159
What's going on?

00:33:42.159 --> 00:33:44.256
That's not additional value.

00:33:44.256 --> 00:33:47.308
What it is is going like we're not getting the maximum amount of our value.

00:33:47.308 --> 00:33:52.932
We've got here, like, let's run a bunch of tests to see how we can move from 10 activation rate to 15 to 20.

00:33:52.932 --> 00:33:57.369
If you move from 10 to 20, you are doubling the value you're putting in your marketing pipeline.

00:33:57.369 --> 00:33:58.773
You're doubling the value of your sales.

00:33:58.773 --> 00:34:05.055
Like that is a very, very small amount of investment you need to make to double everything that's happening upstream.

00:34:05.055 --> 00:34:11.929
And so finding these crunch points and solving them has so much more impact than just adding another feature.

00:34:12.469 --> 00:34:19.034
Right, yeah, I would love to like, I'd love to pivot to you know that that moment you made the transition.

00:34:19.034 --> 00:34:20.967
You know, you, you've been a founder a number of times.

00:34:20.967 --> 00:34:54.210
And then you know, sort of, before we get to the book, going from founder to to vc and and coach, what was the, what was the sort of period in there when, uh, when you, you know, you founded a few different things and then and then you sort of made that jump into um vc and investment yeah, I mean I'm a little bit unusual as I'm a vc from the agency world and that doesn't usually happen, like the vast majority of vcs, to be to be honest, are finance or legal people, because obviously there's a lot of that that goes on in VCs, term sheets and managing a portfolio Of the operators.

00:34:54.489 --> 00:35:03.849
The people that have actually worked in-house it's usually founders who have been moderately successful, not so successful.

00:35:03.849 --> 00:35:07.726
They've got a new life, but kind of they've worked with the fund, the fund have really liked them.

00:35:07.726 --> 00:35:12.045
You know their company may be sold for, you know, low tens of millions.

00:35:12.045 --> 00:35:14.471
They're not ready to kind of do a new thing yet.

00:35:14.471 --> 00:35:17.626
They're not ready to to, you know, retire.

00:35:17.626 --> 00:35:18.909
They want to help the next generation.

00:35:18.909 --> 00:35:32.117
So there's a lot of people in the world that that or very senior cpos or very senior kind of marketers or hr people, because obviously startups have real trouble in the early stages finding talent and figuring out product.

00:35:32.818 --> 00:35:46.893
I come from an agency background, partly because you know, when I started my agency 20 years ago I really, really wanted to work in with startups because you know startups are cool and fun and sexy but all the work I were doing were really big companies now like actually quite envious.

00:35:46.893 --> 00:35:57.570
Like we worked with virgin holidays, virgin atlantic, british you know all the british big energy companies, the bbc, channel four, like brands that like are really really well known.

00:35:57.570 --> 00:36:01.563
In the case we, we redesigned like a penguin random house.

00:36:01.563 --> 00:36:05.652
We took 50 separate imprints and boiled them down into a single website.

00:36:05.652 --> 00:36:08.547
This was like a amazon level of kind of project.

00:36:08.547 --> 00:36:09.952
So we've worked with some brilliant brands.

00:36:09.952 --> 00:36:12.326
But I love the kind of the startup world.

00:36:12.326 --> 00:36:17.668
All of my friends in san francisco were redesigning slack and designing duolingo and I wanted a piece of that.

00:36:18.210 --> 00:36:32.186
But the uk startup scene was really quite tepid, that at the time there was really only like one seed stage fund called c camp, and so I got to know them literally their first year I offered my services up as an advisor and so I would come into their c camp week.

00:36:32.186 --> 00:36:33.492
It's a bit like yc at the time.

00:36:33.492 --> 00:36:40.492
You'd you'd do pictures, you'd sit and kind of advise startups and I did that one year, two years, three years.

00:36:40.492 --> 00:36:45.927
I built up a really good relationship with the founders, the gps, the general partners at the fund and so we just got on.

00:36:45.927 --> 00:36:50.985
Um, the idea was it would be biz dev, that I kind of end up doing some work with these startups.

00:36:50.985 --> 00:36:54.039
Startups don't want to hire agencies, startups want to build in-house teams.

00:36:54.039 --> 00:36:54.842
That never worked.

00:36:54.842 --> 00:37:08.543
But I just kept on coming back and sharing my knowledge and experience and, and you know, we did end up doing, you know, lots of work with with Californian sort of startups, but not really in the uk space, um, and I would come and talk at their events and and just be around.

00:37:09.186 --> 00:37:17.844
When I was wrapping up my, my agency, I sold it, um, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, and so I just reached out to carlos, the general partner at one of the general partners c-camp.

00:37:17.844 --> 00:37:25.291
I said hey, carlos, you know I haven't spoken to you a while, just left my agency, just thought I'd have a chat, and he's's like well, I know you, andy, I know you're really good at product stuff.

00:37:25.291 --> 00:37:27.186
You're really well known on the design space.

00:37:27.186 --> 00:37:31.550
Why don't you just come and spend a couple of months with us, kind of as an entrepreneur in residence?

00:37:31.550 --> 00:37:33.684
We can't pay you, but there's not really.

00:37:33.684 --> 00:37:49.085
You know, you don't have to do a lot, you just have a couple around doing a vc thing and I can do that while I'm figuring out what happens next.

00:37:49.708 --> 00:37:50.188
And I loved it.

00:37:50.188 --> 00:37:54.612
I loved talking to these early stage investors, early stage startup founders.

00:37:54.612 --> 00:38:10.945
I love the energy, I love the enthusiasm, I loved the leaning into all the different industries these people were working with and it turned out that my knowledge of building a business from naught to 30 or 40 people was exactly the spot that these c-stage companies were at.

00:38:10.945 --> 00:38:20.077
You know, um, knowing sales and knowing how to do outbound marketing was exactly the stuff that most of these product-led founders were bad at.

00:38:20.077 --> 00:38:33.027
But, most importantly, getting product out the door and reaching product market fit was something I was excellent at, and so, like after a few months you know when, or six months, when my kind of eir finished, like, carlos came back to me and said look, andy, people love you.

00:38:33.027 --> 00:38:34.030
They really love working with you.

00:38:34.030 --> 00:38:35.403
They're getting a ton of value.

00:38:35.403 --> 00:38:36.568
Do you want to become a partner?

00:38:36.568 --> 00:38:37.451
Do you want to join the fund?

00:38:37.451 --> 00:38:40.244
And I was like hell, yes, and so I am.

00:38:40.244 --> 00:38:42.347
Now I'm a venture partner two days a week.

00:38:42.547 --> 00:38:55.364
It's not full time, um, but I I spend about 20 percent of my time at ccamp doing pre-investment, so talking to potential investments, hopping on calls being pitched at.

00:38:55.364 --> 00:39:02.244
You know, you know a couple of pitches every week, you know, and trying to decide whether these are companies we think are worth investing in.

00:39:02.244 --> 00:39:05.670
But mostly 80 is once we made the investment.

00:39:05.670 --> 00:39:10.065
I look after a portfolio of about 12 16 companies.

00:39:10.065 --> 00:39:13.141
I have a call with the founder every couple of weeks and we just help them.

00:39:13.141 --> 00:39:15.005
You know, um, and there's a.

00:39:15.005 --> 00:39:16.751
There's a really obvious journey.

00:39:16.751 --> 00:39:18.597
You know, um, the.

00:39:19.539 --> 00:39:29.474
So what typically happens is a founder has a vision for a solution that's in their head and they pitch that to a bunch of vcs and one or two of them says I love that vision, have a bunch of money.

00:39:29.474 --> 00:39:38.141
And so their first mental model is I'm just going to ship the thing I promised and nothing will shake them from shipping that thing.

00:39:38.141 --> 00:39:39.806
The designers will go.

00:39:39.806 --> 00:39:40.728
I think this is a bad idea.

00:39:40.728 --> 00:39:41.371
It's not going to work.

00:39:41.371 --> 00:39:43.525
And they're like I don't care, I've got money, I'm shipping the thing.

00:39:43.525 --> 00:39:45.248
The engineers will be like but what about xyz?

00:39:45.248 --> 00:39:50.619
And I don't care, I'm shipping the thing, even like most founders are smart enough to know they're meant to do customer discovery.

00:39:50.619 --> 00:39:57.201
But even customer discovery, what happens is I talked about the customers and I'll say this is what I'm building.

00:39:57.201 --> 00:40:01.447
The customers who say that's brilliant, gives me confidence, I'm on the right path.

00:40:01.447 --> 00:40:05.791
The customers that say that's a terrible idea, I go well, they're idiots, they don't know what they're talking about.

00:40:06.233 --> 00:40:27.960
Because I've raised a bunch of money and I'm building this thing and so, like the first sort of three or four or five months is literally just getting the thing that's been burning inside the founder's head out and into the world, you know, and that is difficult like birthing anything to the world is really tough, and so I can understand why there's like no bandwidth for pivoting and changing and kind of like, you know, because you just want to get it, get it launched.

00:40:27.960 --> 00:40:32.532
And also we know that like it's much easier to get something in the world and then see how it's used.

00:40:32.532 --> 00:40:39.943
Right, what typically happens is most founders get that thing in the world and they sit back and say this is going to be big, this is going to be huge.

00:40:39.943 --> 00:40:48.413
People are just going to come flooding in and they open the gates and then no one comes, or a couple of people come, but they don't really like it.

00:40:48.413 --> 00:40:52.603
Or they come and they use it, but you know so.

00:40:52.744 --> 00:41:02.782
So this expectation of like this thing is amazing and everyone's going to love it, it, it, it withers on the vine, and so then it's like okay, I need more features, throw more features, throw more features, throw more features.

00:41:02.782 --> 00:41:09.563
And it's this idea of the next feature fallacy every feature you throw at the thing you think is going to be the thing that's going to catch fire, but it never does.

00:41:09.563 --> 00:41:16.248
Um, it's like it's like throwing damp logs onto a like a, a campfire, like it just doesn't take.

00:41:16.248 --> 00:41:18.534
And at some stage people go.

00:41:18.534 --> 00:41:24.608
Hopefully the smart founders will go this isn't working, I need to do something differently.

00:41:24.608 --> 00:41:27.465
And it's that point where they think that they need to do something differently.

00:41:27.465 --> 00:41:28.900
It's not just features I need to figure out.

00:41:29.021 --> 00:41:31.070
Why aren't people grokking this thing?

00:41:31.954 --> 00:41:34.141
Maybe people aren't getting it because they don't actually understand it.

00:41:35.226 --> 00:41:36.469
Like you know, the positioning is off.

00:41:37.251 --> 00:41:42.947
Or maybe, like I say, the value isn't being delivered quick enough and so it doesn't bake into people's habits.

00:41:42.947 --> 00:41:44.710
People kick the tires.

00:41:44.710 --> 00:41:51.101
They sign up for the thing they do the demo but oh, I've got to have all this information to sign up and I don't have time now.

00:41:51.101 --> 00:41:52.206
I'll do it two weeks later.

00:41:52.206 --> 00:42:02.882
And then two weeks turns into a month and they go back to their old way of doing things, which in sass is usually some kind of shitty spreadsheet, um, and so none of this stuff bakes in, and so they start fixing that.

00:42:02.882 --> 00:42:07.572
They fix the positioning and more people come on board, they fix the onboarding and it starts to take off.

00:42:07.572 --> 00:42:21.001
They get the value time to value down from you know, two sessions to one session, to 10 minutes, to five minutes, and suddenly everything starts picking up and things are rolling and and that's how they start to realize, oh, I need to.

00:42:21.001 --> 00:42:28.675
You know, the things that the people said to me that I was doing, that I discounted, were actually the blockers and I needed to listen to them more.

00:42:29.161 --> 00:42:32.490
And the thing that the designers and engineers were saying are you sure that we should do it like this?

00:42:32.490 --> 00:42:33.865
Actually, they had a point.

00:42:33.865 --> 00:42:47.876
And so you start, actually, rather than just being a being a concert leader, telling all, the all the musicians what to do, you start gelling as a team and you start making beautiful music and everyone's contributing and it's working really, really nicely, and that's the thing I love.

00:42:47.876 --> 00:42:55.572
And so the first stage is getting that team working and delivering product and inching ever closer to product market fit.

00:42:55.572 --> 00:42:58.527
And then you've got to figure out sales and marketing.

00:42:58.527 --> 00:43:02.864
You've got to find the customers to use it, because it doesn't matter if the product's great if no one's using it.

00:43:04.467 --> 00:43:08.014
And then you know, once you get people coming and kicking the tires, you can learn from them.

00:43:08.014 --> 00:43:10.690
And then you start hitting product market fit.

00:43:10.690 --> 00:43:13.822
And then you start thinking about, like, who are the right people on the right team?

00:43:13.822 --> 00:43:15.646
What are the skills I need?

00:43:15.646 --> 00:43:22.940
And then, lastly, as a founder, you know it was easy when you're running a team of five people, but now you're running a team of 20 or 30 people.

00:43:22.940 --> 00:43:25.405
Things are breaking down, people having arguments.

00:43:25.405 --> 00:43:39.617
You know things were flying two months ago and now everything's bogged down like you try and like free things up by being really dictatorial, but rather than that, helping people are now like having a go at you for being a pain in the ass why wasn't I invited to the meeting?

00:43:39.677 --> 00:43:41.483
because bill was invited to the meeting.

00:43:41.483 --> 00:43:45.672
Yeah, exactly, and so what I I do as a VC is I solve all those problems.

00:43:45.672 --> 00:43:47.025
It's a Maslow's hierarchy of need.

00:43:47.025 --> 00:43:51.065
I start with getting the products out and then I start with iterating the product.

00:43:51.065 --> 00:44:08.347
Then I start with helping them build a pipeline of work you know go-to-market strategy Then I help them sort out the team, then I help them sort out their culture and their style as a leader, and usually that takes about two or three years and that usually is taking them from pre-seed to seed to series a.

00:44:08.967 --> 00:44:10.512
And when they hit series a, things are flying.

00:44:10.512 --> 00:44:18.244
You know they've figured out the product, they've figured out how to to sell, and then it's just a scaling problem, and usually that's somebody else's problem.

00:44:18.244 --> 00:44:25.467
Usually the series a, series b investor will take in and go okay, like andy, you've been great at scaling a team from zero to 30.

00:44:25.467 --> 00:44:29.152
I'm now brilliant at scaling a team from 30 to 200.

00:44:29.152 --> 00:44:32.001
And it's a tag team, and so that's my sweet spot.

00:44:32.001 --> 00:44:34.168
That's where I add the most value to the people I work with.

00:44:34.528 --> 00:44:44.105
That's got to be so much fun, especially going through the process yourself and doing it and then being able to help but not even just help back to the sort of many lives that we like to live.

00:44:44.105 --> 00:44:56.231
You're actually living so many lives through these companies that I also imagine that is that sort of where you also turned, you know, to speaking and coaching and writing.

00:44:56.231 --> 00:44:59.387
The book was coming out of some of these experiences.

00:44:59.768 --> 00:45:00.351
To some extent.

00:45:00.351 --> 00:45:03.510
Yeah, I mean, I've been speaking for 20, 30 years.

00:45:03.510 --> 00:45:10.572
Like my first ever conference talk was at served by southwest 2005, and I've spoken at hundreds of conferences since and I love it.

00:45:10.572 --> 00:45:13.989
I love, I love community, I love spending time with people.

00:45:13.989 --> 00:45:16.266
You know, that's why I love speaking at podcasts and meeting folks like you.

00:45:16.327 --> 00:45:16.407
I.

00:45:16.407 --> 00:45:19.201
I just get a real buzz off of talking to people and helping people.

00:45:19.201 --> 00:45:21.804
Um, I learned so much, you know.

00:45:21.804 --> 00:45:28.574
Like you know, every event I go to, every person I speak to, I take something away, um, and you know we talked at the right start of the show.

00:45:28.574 --> 00:45:32.387
You know, um the desire to kind of learn and always be improving.

00:45:32.927 --> 00:45:56.751
The other thing is that you know, like if I am, if I am building my own business, like I can impact a smaller number of people, but if I can help, if I can help 10 designers build 10 products better, if I can help, if I can help 10 designers build 10 products better, if I can help 10 founders, 20 founders build 20 points better, if I can help a room full of people, you know, improve 100 or 500 or 1000 products, my impact is is is greater.

00:45:57.092 --> 00:46:03.170
It's diluted because I'm only helping them a little bit, but I'm helping, helping more people and and I really get a kick off that.

00:46:03.170 --> 00:46:19.090
And so that's why that's why I speak at conferences, that's why I love the, the vc work and that's why I kind of wrote the book as well to kind of take this, this, this knowledge and experience, and get it as as as widely distributed as possible so I can have a have a big impact and just make better stuff.

00:46:19.090 --> 00:46:22.184
You know, we've all lived in a world where they've been frustrated by technology.

00:46:22.184 --> 00:46:23.628
Why doesn't this exist?

00:46:23.628 --> 00:46:24.911
Is this broken?

00:46:24.911 --> 00:46:27.476
Why does this work the way it does and not a better way?

00:46:27.476 --> 00:46:34.311
And so if I can get more people removing all that friction and frustration, then I've had a good impact and I've had a good career.

00:46:34.920 --> 00:46:35.260
Amazing.

00:46:35.260 --> 00:46:44.771
Well, and speaking of the book, I actually I have it on the Kindle and I'm starting it and I'm starting into it, so I'm really excited about that from from the book's perspective.

00:46:44.771 --> 00:46:53.490
Um, what's the what's the ideal moment, the ideal person and the ideal moment to sort of, uh, absorb what's in the book I mean, that's a really good question.

00:46:53.530 --> 00:47:03.447
So I, a lot of my friends, are experienced founders and when I was writing the book, I wanted to get their view and the view was basically like this is the book that I wish I'd read at the start of my journey.

00:47:03.887 --> 00:47:06.393
Like all the stuff in the book absolutely agree with.

00:47:06.393 --> 00:47:17.128
These are all things that I had a huge amount of pain learning and, like you know, it took me five or six years to figure this stuff out, and if I'd have read the book it would have taken me two years.

00:47:17.128 --> 00:47:22.052
And so the real kind of ideal is like the start of your founder journey.

00:47:22.052 --> 00:47:27.789
Like Brilliant would be a little bit like Lean Startup, like if you read it before you even wanted to start a startup.

00:47:27.789 --> 00:47:30.568
The reality is that most people won't think like that.

00:47:30.568 --> 00:47:32.527
Most people will read it when they get stuck.

00:47:32.527 --> 00:47:34.806
Like the book is called the Growth Equation.

00:47:34.806 --> 00:47:36.927
It's all about early stage startup growth.

00:47:36.927 --> 00:47:40.070
It's all about how you can ignite that fire of growth.

00:47:40.070 --> 00:47:57.784
Find your first 10, 100,000 customers, get your first 10, 000 customers, get your first 10 100 million arr all the things you need to get up to kind of seed stage and beyond, and so what I typically find is, as I said before, like founders are really singular.

00:47:57.784 --> 00:47:59.989
They think they know the right answer and so they will.

00:47:59.989 --> 00:48:00.900
They will forge ahead.

00:48:00.900 --> 00:48:08.172
They won't want to read a book like mine at the start because that will get in the way of building the thing, but I think the book is best.

00:48:11.719 --> 00:48:13.579
You had an expectation that your product would be growing at a certain rate, but it's stalled.

00:48:13.579 --> 00:48:18.608
The product is out, the company's six months in.

00:48:18.608 --> 00:48:20.226
The product's launched for three months.00:48:20.226 --> 00:48:23.610


You thought you'd be at 50 MRR now but you're at five.00:48:23.610 --> 00:48:25.987


Your VCs are breathing down your neck.00:48:25.987 --> 00:48:28.065


You know you're gonna have to raise in six months time.00:48:28.146 --> 00:48:29.389


Do your your seed stage?00:48:29.389 --> 00:48:32.545


How do I unlock growth when you hit that problem?00:48:32.545 --> 00:48:40.125


When you hit that growth problem, you're gonna hopefully reach for the book, like my book, and go okay, this book will help me figure out what's going on.00:48:40.125 --> 00:48:54.110


It's kind kind of like a um, a, a sort of a, a sort of a, a tool for for understanding where your growth is stuck and kind of unlocking that growth, and so that's kind of where I think most people will get it.00:48:54.110 --> 00:48:56.646


It's like things are slowed down, things are stalled.00:48:56.646 --> 00:48:57.688


I'm not where I need to be.00:48:58.391 --> 00:49:03.849


I'll reach for this book and I'll, I'll, you know, and probably flick through some of the chapters and be like is my problem around?00:49:03.849 --> 00:49:07.121


You know um acquisition, yes or no?00:49:07.121 --> 00:49:10.047


Is it about you know um go-to-market strategy?00:49:10.047 --> 00:49:13.282


Is it about sales and marketing or is it about product related stuff?00:49:13.282 --> 00:49:28.268


Is it onboarding, acquisition, retention, pricing, like I tackle all of the kind of the main kind of like stumbling blocks that my founders have struggled with, and so it might be you just read two or three of the the chapters you like okay, this is the bit in the book, this is a bit I'm struggling with.00:49:28.268 --> 00:49:37.490


I will just lean into this and what typically happens is people unlock that bit and then something else in the value chain breaks and oh, I saw that other thing in this book that I will go to that next chapter.00:49:37.490 --> 00:49:42.110


So, yeah, it's really about kind of unblocking those, those, those growth inhibitors.00:49:42.150 --> 00:49:46.251


I guess amazing and what, what, what would you say for a founder?00:49:46.251 --> 00:49:49.929


If the founder opens it up and is sort of midway through their process?00:49:49.929 --> 00:50:00.865


What are the sort of two chapters, two topics that you would say to sort of focus in on, or the two that would maybe be the most impactful, especially in the first six months?00:50:01.085 --> 00:50:01.286


I mean.00:50:01.286 --> 00:50:03.981


So I'll answer that, but I'll step back a little bit.00:50:03.981 --> 00:50:16.465


So I call it the growth equation, because I've kind of got these sort of seven arguments or facets, I think have an outsized impact of growth positive and negative, and I break that down into kind of like product related, to market related.00:50:16.465 --> 00:50:20.523


And this is important because I find that there were kind of two kinds of founder archetypes.00:50:20.523 --> 00:50:24.253


The vast majority of founders are product makers and builders.00:50:24.253 --> 00:50:26.722


They're really good at the product stuff.00:50:26.722 --> 00:50:29.248


The thing that they really lack is the go-to-market.00:50:29.248 --> 00:50:35.094


They struggle with sales, they struggle with marketing, they struggle with like catching fire.00:50:35.655 --> 00:50:48.628


And so if you're, if you're a product related founder, then it's the two or three chapters at the start of the book all about like how to unlock sales, how to market properly, how to get people into the system, because also you can't iterate and improve if you don't have enough people.00:50:48.628 --> 00:50:52.313


If you've got five customers, all of your experiments are going to not really show anything.00:50:52.313 --> 00:50:57.248


If you've got 50, 100, 200 customers, you know you want to get a cohort of new people coming through.00:50:57.248 --> 00:51:07.333


And sadly, I think a lot of product focused leaders think, oh, marketing in sales is somebody else's problem, growth is somebody else's problem and they hire somebody.00:51:07.333 --> 00:51:09.585


They hire an SDR or a salesperson it doesn't work out.00:51:09.585 --> 00:51:13.105


They hire a marketer it doesn't work out and usually out of frustration they go.00:51:13.326 --> 00:51:18.110


Well, I better do this myself and I guess my focus is growth is your primary goal.00:51:18.110 --> 00:51:22.809


You can build a backlog of product features that you can give to your team.00:51:22.809 --> 00:51:28.101


They can be driving forward.00:51:28.101 --> 00:51:31.115


You have to get into the uncomfortable spaces, stuff that you're not good at, and that is probably growth and that is probably sales and marketing.00:51:31.115 --> 00:51:35.876


So, yeah, if you're put up person focus company, it's the sales and marketing bits of the book that are really important.00:51:35.978 --> 00:51:37.382


And then obviously, the other way around.00:51:37.382 --> 00:51:51.304


I do meet a smaller number of people that are just a charming and and charismatic and they could sell ice to eskimos or Inuits or you know whatever we frame it, but they just don't understand that like they've got all these people coming to their system and it's not sticky.00:51:51.304 --> 00:51:57.164


People are not signing up, they're not activating, they're not getting value and they struggle.00:51:57.164 --> 00:52:06.190


And so if you're that kind of business focused person that you're wondering like growth is stalled because it's a product problem, then it's the product chapters of the book that are really, really important.00:52:06.190 --> 00:52:10.204


So it's kind of yeah, it's a story of two halves nice, I love that.00:52:10.304 --> 00:52:11.387


I love that way of approaching it.00:52:11.387 --> 00:52:17.005


Uh, what's one thing right now that you're just like on fire about that, you're excited about that, you.00:52:17.005 --> 00:52:23.144


You wake up and and you're just like thinking about it, or or that you're working on I mean it's, it's, it's, it's a.00:52:23.206 --> 00:52:47.925


it's a slightly weird thing because it's not to do with my, my day job, um, but I recently I think I sort of alluded to maybe I recently started to learn to drum and so I'm kind of I'm really getting into the drumming and so I'm finding myself sitting at the table and sitting in the car and just kind of my, my mind is is doing that thing, and I think, partly because it's quite a handy thing to do with your hands, like you don't have to think you can, you can kind of just be absorbed into this sort of like flow state and so I'm really enjoying that.00:52:47.925 --> 00:52:49.764


It turns of the startup world.00:52:49.764 --> 00:53:11.054


I mean again, like I'm loving the book, I'm loving the feedback I'm getting, I'm just I just love working with founders and so like if the question was like what's one sector that's exciting, is your favorite?00:53:11.054 --> 00:53:11.735


Or which of your, your school kids, is the smartest?00:53:11.735 --> 00:53:13.521


Like, right, I'm a bit of a kind of an absorber of things and so like, weirdly, the most exciting thing at any one time is a person I'm talking to in that moment.00:53:13.521 --> 00:53:15.807


You know, if someone is really excited about a particular technology like this is a weird thing like.00:53:15.847 --> 00:53:42.023


For me, in the weirdest kind of way, the products like the best are the kind of the boring products, like you know, like I've got a lot of people in my portfolio that are innovating in e-commerce, logistics or or reordering or like, and these are things I wouldn't, at the first thought go like this is a really exciting space, right, but because it's seemingly boring and also because it's seemingly hard, people don't touch it.00:53:42.963 --> 00:53:51.076


It's like this is too big a problem, like I'm going to do another like you know um, ai, chatbot or kind of you know nft or whatever, because I know how to do that.00:53:51.076 --> 00:54:02.903


Like the really kind of big, messy, dull problems when you actually get into them are fascinating, and so the products that I'm finding they're getting the most traction are like this is an industry that hasn't been touched for 10 or 15 years.00:54:02.903 --> 00:54:05.829


You know most of them aren't even.00:54:05.829 --> 00:54:12.329


You know they're still, you know doing things on paper or spreadsheets, and I am bringing all the things I've learned with this new technology.00:54:12.329 --> 00:54:18.632


I'm bringing AI, I'm bringing predictive kind of you know, like engines into this thing.00:54:18.632 --> 00:54:33.182


I'm taking an industry that, like the old guard of retiring and the new people in it are used to being brought up on on tablets and iphones they want an amazing customer experience and the thing that we're delivering them is really resonating.00:54:33.222 --> 00:54:37.643


And so, yeah, I'm geeking out on logistics and and e-commerce returns.00:54:37.643 --> 00:54:39.347


I invested in e-commerce returns company recently.00:54:39.347 --> 00:54:47.594


It's like you know, return sounds really boring, but once you start diving into it, it's like there's some really great stuff going complex machine yeah, yeah.00:54:47.914 --> 00:54:55.452


So yeah, it's weirdly and and it's it's getting hyped about other people's like weird niches, like and in a way, like that's what you want.00:54:55.452 --> 00:54:59.983


When someone's pitching, someone's pitching, and you feel that they're not even interested in it, then it doesn't matter.00:54:59.983 --> 00:55:04.806


But if they're, if they're like geeking out over thing, it makes you think maybe there's something I've missed here.00:55:04.806 --> 00:55:15.688


Like these people are so energized and enthusiastic about something that seems quite dull and then you get drawn in and you start realizing this is not dull at all, it's just it's complicated and kind of geeky.00:55:15.688 --> 00:55:18.987


So yeah, it's that kind of stuff that really excites me.00:55:19.369 --> 00:55:19.750


Amazing.00:55:19.750 --> 00:55:33.402


Well, I love that and I love the fact that you love sort of going deep and into the machine and working with your founders on that.00:55:33.402 --> 00:55:33.844


That's amazing.00:55:33.844 --> 00:55:47.653


Well, this has been great and I really appreciate you coming on and this is such a fun, great conversation of just really getting into the nitty gritty of how to solve those problems and design, and I think this, I think this is it's one of my favorite topics, so I appreciate you coming on and sharing.00:55:48.175 --> 00:55:50.876


It was absolutely my pleasure, lovely to connect, lovely to talk about this stuff.00:55:50.876 --> 00:55:54.349


As you know, I can, I can talk about this kind of topic to the cows come home.00:55:54.349 --> 00:55:56.405


So yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure.00:55:56.405 --> 00:55:58.130


Awesome, have a good day, thank you.00:55:58.130 --> 00:55:58.612


See you later.